…Despite all efforts of the prosecution everybody could see that this man was not a monster, but it was difficult not to suspect that he was not a clown. ( Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem ) Written at the same time as the Eichmann trial, it was to become Jerry Lewis’s aborted holocaust film about a clown leading jews to their death….
Kitsch.Much of modern culture is simply kitsch. It may have artistic pretensions, and laudable intentions, but it is still kitsch. Regressively and desublimated, everything, like gravity heads to the shithouse; crap being the ultimate kitsch. Shit like the Lewis film never completed itself, but plenty other works dealing with the holocaust do and they all suffer from kitsch, examples of perverted, depraved and evil representations. Even an Oscar winner like Life is Beautiful. At its core, the perversity is complicit with a kind of emotional decadence. A regression to profound infantilism where the viewer is turned or transformed into a voyeur, which devalues the act of looking, and makes all kitschy art quite insidious. Nefarious. The holocaust is used as a voyeur’s ingenious devaluation of the body which can be seen as a seductive sex object. All this perversity makes it no longer the site of a person, but a theater to project twisted idealizations of desire, or using the death and suffering of others to mourn us out of our personal bouts of melancholia.
---Kuspit:The victims of history become sacred in memory-what we would prefer to forget becomes unforgettable: eternal. Wood’s work is double-edged, for what has been lost is found again in memory-indeed, remains fixed and felt in memory, an idee fix of feeling given memorable form–even as memory shows that it is dead. Wood’s work burns itself into our memory, even as it tells us that memory is the corpse of history. The flame that annihilates and the flame that is eternal are indissolubly one in her work. As the holocaust recedes into history, its significance tends to be forgotten, but Wood overwhelms us with it by burying us alive, as it were, in the memory of it. She reminds us that it was the climactic pogrom of ideas as well as people: she rescues-¬relentlessly excavates, one might say, like an obsessive archaeologist-some 700 books and newspapers dealing with it, directly or indirectly. They are the dead bones of the holocaust, but her work shows that they are uncannily alive. She gives them body, as it were, by accumulating them: each is a fragment of feeling and tissue of thought, arranged in an assemblage that conveys their abundance while acknowledging their incompleteness: more can be found, in whatever dustbins of society. Wood’s work is overwhelming, intimidating evidence of man’s inhumanity to man, a painful abundance of physical memory traces which she makes more overwhelming and intimidating by piling them up, seemingly randomly, in a monumental, totemic reconstruction of history, which immediately deconstructs into a catastrophic ruin. Read More:http://stendhalgallery.com/?p=5670
All works of kitsch art, and Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried is, or appears to be, an egregious representation, either in avant-garde disguise or popular mass market entertainment kitsch, serves devalue, degrade, and abuse or mock its subject matter and viewer through perversely selling short its true potential. Almost all holocaust films, -the holocaust industry- museums, tourist attractions, end up perversely destroying fragmenting and dehumanizing the object, reinforcing the initial evil and reducing the result to kitsch. Kitsch is the socially and commercially dominant and prevailing motif, which implies the mainstream indoctrination of kitsch as embedded value of our lives. No doubt, in cinema and television, the act of looking is voyeuristic, and fetishizing is encouraged, the erotic hysteria, the “buzz” that ignites the consumerist impulse. You have to question whether women oriented shows- empowerment, tolerance shows, racism themes, etc, ostensibly to promote a better and more progressive society, are not, an may be actually satisfying perverse impulses stoked up just below the slimy surface.
Read More:http://www.pcpmalta.com/news/update2.htm
…It sounds like a punchline in an overheated Hollywood satire: Jerry Lewis in Auschwitz. Depending on your taste, the prospect may be as offensive or as inttriguing as … well, truly, no metaphor measures up to the particulars. A synopsis:
An unhappy German circus clown is sent to a concentration camp and forced to become a sort of genocidal Pied-Piper, entertaining Jewish children as he leads them to the gas chambers. The story is meant to be played as drama. By all accounts, no one sings “You’ll Never
Walk Alone”, and Tony Orlando does not appear….
Jean Antoine Watteau. Read More:/2010/10/watteauembedded-language-as-an-art-of-living/
…The Day the Clown Cried was supposed to be Lewis’ first serious film as both director and star, a proto-Interiors, “a turning point in the career of one of the most unusual performers in history”, as the move press kit put it, adding that Lewis is “a 20th Century … phenomenon like atomic
energy, moon shot, heart transplants, and hippies….” Nevertheless, many in Hollywood were skeptical about the project. Many outside Hollywood were skeptical, too. Even French film critics were skeptical. As Jean-Pierre Coursodon would write a few years later in Film Comment, “While it is not surprising that Lewis should come round to disclose a fondness for pathos shared by so many comedians (there had been warning hints in his earlier pictures), his selection of such a painfully bizarre theme does come as a bit of a shock.” Read More:http://www.subcin.com/clownspy.html
…But it was Lewis, finally, around whom the requisite financing coalesced, and he took his responsibility to heart: “I thought The Day the Clown Cried would be a way to show we don’t have to tremble and give up in the darkness,” he wrote. “(The Clown) would teach us this lesson.”
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Read More:http://www.subcin.com/clownspy.html
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